How to Shape Short Nails Correctly

Beauty tutorials are big on YouTube -- a search for "makeup tutorial" and "hair tutorial" yields more than 5 million videos. In this weekly series, we put a mix of popular and under-the-radar tutorials to the test and show you what's best.

While I've always been pretty good at painting my nails, even with my non-dominant hand, they never look as good as they would after a salon manicure, and I think that is largely because I'm not good at shaping them. Do I cut them with a nail clipper first? Can I go back and forth with the nail file? How do I make them neither square nor round, but something in between? How do I make them even? These are the questions I ask myself.

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My nail shaping endeavors are further complicated by the fact that my nails are usually both short and thin. We just don't choose the hands we're dealt in life, ya know?

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Fortunately, I found this very in-depth tutorial by an actual nail technician, who explains and demonstrates how to do the short, square-with-round-edges shape I'm looking for, and how not to damage your nails in the process

She also makes the whole nail-shaping process seem so simple that I almost feel like an idiot, but I think that's what I needed. The key, it seems, is filing flat first, and then at an angle.